Koizumi Talks About Themes and Inspiration for Super Mario Odyssey

GameMaster magazine had a chat with Super Mario Odyssey producer Yoshiaki Koizumi and had the following to say about the game:

“I’ve been involved on pretty much all the 3D Mario titles since 64. And as you design and develop those games you’re constantly making discoveries about what works in a 3D Mario game, so I would say they’re all kind of connected. It’s like Super Mario Odyssey has the DNA of all of those in it.”

“One of the main themes of this game is travel. You’re traveling to a place for the first time and you encounter people or inhabitants there that have characteristics you’ve never seen before, so it’s surprising. Creating those new characters and new enemies was a really important part of the overall game design.

When Mario is in New Donk City, he’s quite a lot shorter than the real people that live there, but that’s something I’ve also felt in real life when traveling. You know, the differences in the size of people is something that makes you feel, ‘Oh yeah, I’m abroad now’.”

“One of the first things that I showed to the Odyssey development team were the Joy-Con. And I said to them, ‘Please make sure you make use of the Joy-Con when designing the game, the fact that you can hold them in both hands separately, the HD rumble.’ All the functionality, I asked them to take it into consideration.”

Nathanial Rumphol-Janc

A veteran in the video game media sphere, Nathanial co-founded Gamnesia, founded MetroidWiki.org, ran the news the segment on the Zelda Universe Podcast, found and ran Zelda Domain from 1998 to 2006, and built Zelda Informer as the Editor-in-Chief from 2008 to 2017. He now owns and operates Nintendo Prime. You can follow him on twitter @NateJanc, otherwise just stay tuned at Nintendo Prime for more of his work.